Affordable BPS occupy a special and controversial space in India’s complex multi-layered K-12 system. Politicians, bureaucrats and leftists love to hate them because they are for-profit and pride themselves as English-medium schools Within India’s complex, multi-layered K-12 school system, budget private schools — essentially affordable primaries (with a sprinkling of secondary schools) — occupy a special and controversial space. These are privately promoted, low-priced schools that politicians, bureaucrats and Left intellectuals love to hate because they are for-profit and also because almost all of them pride themselves as English-medium schools. The country’s business illiterate neta-babu brotherhood and lefties hate the word ‘profit’ and are unanimous in their belief that children learn best in the language their parents speak at home rather than a language imposed upon the country by British imperialists. The fact that contemporary India has 29 official languages spoken in 278 dialects, or the reality that a primary classroom may comprise children speaking over a dozen mother tongues hasn’t dented their belief that pre-primary and primary including upper primary school children should be taught in the mother tongue. Evidently, the vast majority of the population — especially poor aspirational households — don’t agree with this holy trinity. Because the number of budget private schools (BPS) across the country — many of them ‘unrecognised’ by government — has ballooned to an estimated 400,000 with a staggering enrolment of 60 million children. For aspirational working and lower middle-class households, BPS fashioned after private schools and providing English-medium education, offer the best alternative to dysfunctional government schools defined by decrepit infrastructure, chronic teacher absenteeism and English language aversion. However with establishment opinion ranged against BPS, because they are increasingly drawing children away from government schools, thousands have been issued closure notices for non-compliance with s.19 and Schedule of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009, which stipulates minimal infrastructure and teacher-pupil ratio norms from which government schools are exempt, and deliberately target BPS. Moreover, the raging Coronavirus pandemic has hit affordable private schools hardest. With state governments issuing confusing and contradictory circulars to the public to not pay school fees during the pandemic lockdown, even while directing school managements to continue paying teacher and staff salaries, hundreds of BPS have shut down and thousands are confronted with the prospect of bankruptcy. Repeated demands by BPS managements, representative associations including NISA (National Independent Schools Alliance) which has a membership of 60,000 affordable schools, and EducationWorld (see https://www.educationworld.in/dear-prime-minister-why-no-pandemic-package-for-education/)for loans and grants under the prime minister’s Rs.20 lakh crore economy stimulus package of May 2020, have failed to evoke any response from the Central or state governments. In EducationWorld your editors believe that BPS discharge a vitally important socio-economic development role as they provide lower middle and working class households an alternative to dysfunctional government schools. Therefore, earlier this year in a cover story following a national survey, we published elaborate league tables rating and ranking the country’s 300 most respected BPS (see https://www.educationworld.in/educationworld-current-issue/educationworld-february-2020/). However because of the…
